Reeling from killings, trans community calls for understanding

NEW YORK CITY – On the eve of one the nation’s largest gay pride parades, a rainbow of colors illuminated the Empire State Building like a guiding light for hundreds of thousands of people flowing into the city for Sunday’s festivities.

But just a couple of avenues east in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, transgender rights activists crowded into a dim room, reading speeches and poems about why they were skipping this year's Pride festivities.

“While you’re off celebrating Pride, our community is dealing with the brutal deaths of Zoraida Reyes, Tiff Edwards, Yaz’min Shancez,” said Lourdes Ashley Hunter, speaking at an anti-Pride event organized by poet activists DarkMatter. Hunter is a member of the Audre Lorde Project’s TransJustice program, a New York-based organization for trans and gender non-conforming people of color.

The tagline of NYC Pride’s website reads, “Yesterday’s struggle is today’s heritage.” However, for transgender people of color the struggle continues.

Every week of June this year – a month designated to remember the history and struggle of the LGBT community – a transgender woman of color was found dead.

On June 3, Kandy Hall’s body was found in a field northeast of Baltimore. Eight days later, on June 11, Zoraida Reyes, a 28-year-old Mexican activist involved in Southern California transgender and immigration advocacy groups, was found behind a Dairy Queen. Her death is still being investigated as suspicious. On June 19, the burned body of Yaz’min Shancez, 31, was found behind a dumpster. And on June 26, three days before New York and San Francisco Pride, 28-year-old Tiff Edwards was found shot to death in a suburb of Ohio.

Hunter’s speech at the start of the “Anti-Pride” poetry slam captured the feelings of many transgender people of color.

“The mortality rate of a black trans woman is 35 years old,” Hunter said. “I’m not supposed to be here...put that on the cover of Time.”

The Audre Lorde Project maintains that violence against trans and gender non-conforming people is increasing exponentially. According to a recent report by the Anti-Violence Project (AVP), trans women of color are especially vulnerable. In 2013, 89 percent of LGBT homicide victims were people of color, with 72 percent of those being transgender women, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs.

“We’re seeing increased visibility, absolutely,” said Shelby Chestnut, AVP’s co-director of community organizing and public advocacy, “but the severity of violence impacting trans and gender non-conforming people of color remains the highest we’ve continued to see for multi-year trends both here in New York and nationally.”

To shine light on that violence, the Audre Lorde Project organized a march on the Friday afternoon before NYC Pride through Greenwich Village to “reclaim” the streets of the Stonewall Riots. Organizers deliberately called it a march and not a parade to highlight their calls for action. Their demands ranged from passing the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would make discrimination based on gender identity or expression in the state of New York illegal, to demanding that undocumented transgender individuals be granted asylum.

The Trans Day of Action march caught the attention of Cox and Mock, who endorsed the march and tweeted their support.

The march was a rare moment of unity for white transgender people, transgender people of color and gay and straight cisgender allies, according to transgender activist Madison St. Claire, who helps train New York Police Department recruits on trans issues. For example, the rally at the beginning of the march was translated for Spanish speakers. A sign language interpreter even translated speeches for the deaf and hard of hearing. St. Claire said that race divides the transgender community and that as a black transgender woman she’s “seen as the lowest on the totem pole.” However, the biggest divide she observed is between the cisgender gays and lesbians and the transgender community.

“You have to understand something: Pride Month has really nothing to do with the trans community,” said St. Claire, referencing that it was an event for cisgender gays and lesbians. “Just because Laverne Cox is the grand marshal of the Pride parade, which is a wonderful thing, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

As the march came to an end, organizers cautioned the crowd standing on the docks of the Christopher St. Pier to get home safely and travel in groups. Like St. Claire, Chin empathized with other transgender activists who felt excluded from Pride. As gay-marriage bans are struck down across the country, most recently in Kentucky, they felt that transgender rights have been left behind.

“[Gay marriage] seemed to become the face of the LGBT movement, [but] the movement is really much broader,” Chin said. “ I don’t mind if [marriage] is the face...but it’s like OK, we’re here fighting for trans women who, as you’ve heard, we’ve lost [four of] in the past month.”